British firm Skyscanner is to open a US office and hire 100 new staff after
its profits more than doubled last year.

The online travel retailer, which allows customers to compare and buy flights from multiple different airlines, saw earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation grow by around 150pc to £12m last year. Sales jumped by two thirds to £33.5m.

The 180-strong company will create around 90 new jobs at its offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow this year, to help fuel expansion, and hire a further 10 staff overseas.

It already has offices in Singapore and Beijing, and now plans to open a new office in the US, which it will use the new Miami operation as a base to hire staff from each country in North and South America to help it tailor the website to each of those places.

Chief executive Gareth Williams said that the company wanted to expand all over the world, and eventually become the biggest flight price comparison site there is, but that it needed people with local knowledge if each market first.

“It is about making sure that the airlines are the ones people would expect to see [in each different country],” Mr Williams said.

“The quality of the site to a Peruvian, for example, is very dependent on a lot of local knowledge of how the travel industry operates there. Lots of websites can get away with just language translation [to launch into new territories], but we have to do a lot more with the content, In many countries we are still competing with bricks and mortar travel agents.”

The website, which takes a cut of every flight sold through the site, is already available in 40 countries and 30 languages.

The number of visitors to Skyscanner rose by 84pc in 2012 to more than 30m a month, whilst more than 12m people have downloaded its mobile app, the company said.